GL95

They had no idea what to do with Eleni with Frank unless there was another man competing over her. I think one thing that might have been good would’ve been to bring on at least one of her brothers and make him a pot stirrer (they established the brothers liking AM so there would be potential for him to be a hot ambitious type who gets a boost at Spaulding from AM).

I was thinking the other day that while they had Melina K, I think rather than the never ending Eleni is a hostage to AM’s lies plot they’d had AM suck her into his world by putting her with the Foundation and has more internal struggle with her immigrant roots and the power/wealth. They play with it a bit but it pretty much falls into a very black/white narrative of everything about Frank/working class life being noble and everything with AM/wealth being empty. They really wrote Eleni into a corner pretty early to do much of anything interesting.

Haha though I feel like by the time we hit timetraveling through portraits that I was getting nostalgic for the time where Amish Reva was the most ridiculous Reva plot.

Every 1988 episode coming soon haha

You actually inadvertently outlined why I think the Blake/AM scenes work for me with Liz. The exes who still have a connection works with the recast with the softer chemistry, and it has a lived in feel to the dynamic that I like. Granted I watched out of order, but I completely bought from their first scene that they had a history even if the actors didn't. I feel like in the scenes with Ross since that's the A plot with Blake that Liz is trying to act like Sherry and the writing is trying to keep the Ross/Blake dynamic roughly the same at first, but Liz could do more her own interpretation of Blake in the AM scenes that feels more natural in those early months. I actually think Blake/Ross becoming a stable couple had a pretty big butterfly effect on the show that's not just the recast. For all intents and purposes, Blake basically chooses Ross over Roger. It also takes her out of the Spaulding orbit even though they built up a lot of history there. They really had no idea what to do with Roger for Zas's last couple of years, and the Roger vs the Spaulding family loses something when Blake doesn't have some sort of alliance with one of the Spaulding men. (I think one thing to have done was have Blake immediately come clean with Ross about the night with AM and he forgives her since she's actually being honest and he had broken up with her first, then it turns out she's pregnant with AM's baby a month or so after that after Ross is pretty fully committed.).

In this conversation he basically asks why she let it happen when she was twelve-she said she enjoyed the attention basically and he asked didn’t she have enough love attention from Sarah/HB etc. He eventually concedes it wasn’t her fault.

Came across another 1989 episodes-September 1. There was a lot of interesting things happening. First, for maybe the first (?) but certainly not last time, Holly is visiting Blake in the hospital (not clear why she's there) telling her to let Phillip know she knows that Beth is alive and warning her that the lie will likely blow up in her face. A lesson Blake will not learn at any point in the future. Blake of course lies to him and convinces him that she will help him find Beth but he can't hide anything from her, which is some real masterwork. Reva/Josh talk about her past sexual abuse and the rape when she was 14 I believe she's lying about which is actually her sleeping with Billy to conceive Dylan. (Have seen snatches on this but don't know the whole story.). Reva "has a feeling" she is pregnant (which she likely is with Shayne) and she blows off Josh's concerns about her having another child after her post-Marah coma. If she had listened we'd have no Amish Reva, island people, or Jonathan haha Dylan/Harley have a conversation about Daisy/Susan. Dylan got himself a job doing the Lemays lawncare-Harley tells him AM has promised he'll get Susan/Daisy back for her using the Spaulding power but Dylan talks her out of try because Susan is happy. Dylan also has arranged for Sam to babysit and invites Harley to meet her just once-and after that the two of them agree to not see her again. (We know how that goes.)

Yeah, this is my thinking. Couples that have more natural external conflict can actually be your better long-term couples in a soap IMO because you don’t have to jump through a bunch of crazy hoops to create drama. (See Reva/Josh.) Just the grandfather drama alone between Roger/Alan and the kid’s chosen grandfather Ed is interesting-and Ed/Holly/Roger basically sharing a grandkid? (I know Ed is not the actual grandfather but given his father figure role to both AM/Blake he’d be a de facto grandpa-if Ed/Holly started acting like primary grandparents together it would make Roger apoplectic.) I know I’m in in the minority, and this probably comes from viewing Liz’s Blake first, but I think Liz/Rick had potential chemistry to be a long-term romantic pairing. There was a lot of mutual affection in their scenes of two people who know each other well/get each other with the little underlying resentment from the past simmering up here and there. I’d have put them on some path to grow closer as friends who still have a spark-of course my unwritten fan fiction forever is AM working for Roger as his heir apparent alongside Blake. I know AM had lots of reason to hate Roger but Roger also understands AM’s motivations far better than his own family. (Maybe Hart decides he actually wants part of it but AM is now the son Roger always wanted and AM is the Phillip to Hart’s AM in that dynamic.)

It’s funny because to me it feels like they were setting it up in pretty typical soap couple form for Blake/AM. She manipulates and lies which leads to their divorce. He leads her on to help him succeed at work. They each enter a relationship with someone “good” in their eyes and learn some lessons but stay friends and confidants for well over a year, setting it up for a “real” relationship with them ostensibly as their better selves and the power dynamic even. It just feels to me like a lot of organic character driven drama comes out of Blake/AM between their internal struggles to want to be better people than their fathers while also fighting their worst instincts and the external struggles between their families (and Ed being a father figure to both of them while their actual fathers loathe each other).

Took a break from 1993 when Youtube pushed February 6, 1990 and I was curious why it looked like Harley had been in a fire. It turns out it was the episode right after the Fifth Street Fire where Pops was killed. AM saved Dylan from the fire and also a box of Harley's keepsakes and found a love letter from Harley to Dylan (Harley/AM were already separated). He's in shock from the whole thing and goes to see Blake and she takes care of him and runs him a bath and the whole thing is filled with sexual tension-they are making out at the end of the episode. It was interesting to watch AM/Blake first get together and her initially trying to fight her feeling as I had always thought Blake was scheming to ensnare AM from the very beginning.

I get it-I still think Blake should've gotten pregnant from the AM/Blake Bauer cabin tryst. The other way I would've given AM a kid was to have AM get swept to sea (no body of course) rather than saved by Zachary and Lucy ends up pregnant rather than go through a recast. I would be mostly amused by the elephant in the room of Reva surviving driving a car off a bridge into the ocean as everyone tries to convince Lucy to move on since AM couldn't have survived. (I don't get why you wouldn't have just given Lucy/AM a kid offscreen especially given the Cooper/Spaulding focus late in the show.)

To be clear, I don't think they succeeded in highlighting AM/Rick well. Tangie couldn't have ended up pregnant because AM/Tangie never had sex-they were about to and realized they didn't have condoms and AM went out to buy some and while he was gone Alan showed up and AM caught them together. I was a bit amused watching the recent 1993 episode where AM blows off the model to help Gilly at the hotel because if I'm not mistaken he was in for a very long dry spell (at least onscreen). (I wouldn't normally keep track that closely but it was obviously a significant plot point for Lucy/AM.) I wish they hadn't messed with any of the Tangie/AM/Alan stuff and toyed more with Nick/Tangie. It's funny but I found Nick the most tolerable with Tangie/Susan and thought he had decent chemistry with Tangie. Alan continuing to pursue Tangie while with Nick actually would have been a more interesting plot if Alan had tried to go scorched earth on Nick. I've mentioned it before, but what I felt would've helped that plot was for Blake to discover AM and be part of hiding him. Not necessarily for anything romantic to happen, but to throw Blake into the AM/Alan story more and cause some tension with Ross. Blake/AM having some vulnerable moments about their respective fathers and bonding would have made that story a lot better, and Blake having flashes of jealousy to add non-Alan conflict to AM/Tangie would've helped.

I watched AM's journey out of order so having seen 1995 first I was predisposed to sympathize with him. I actually think AM's story got taken off course a lot by Blake/Ross not just being a fling. To me, AM was Blake's Frankenstein. There's a scene I loved right before AM/Blake split where he's worried about whatever is happening with Gary and he tries to get her drunk to talk to him, but she is onto him and he sheepishly admits his plan. While he was bad at it, he was starting to learn to manipulate. He wanted nothing to do with her after their divorce but she kept doing things for his career (she took over that Daniel St. John presentation that Roger was trying to thwart without AM's knowledge, and at first you think she's getting revenge but she actually sells it from a PR angle which started them interacting at work). There's a scene just after Roger is exposed where AM is initially pretty content to continue to work his way up but Blake pushes him to fill the vacuum left by Roger's departure. She has a lot of the underhanded ideas initially to go at Vanessa. For instance, when AM flat out refuses to expose Vanessa was the rape victim in the papers Blake is the one who says at least he should try to take advantage of the situation. Blake is pretty much always in his ear. I don't think AM actually instigates anything himself until he blackmails Nadine about talking to the Inquisitors to get Billy's bid. Then when she calls immigration on Eleni, AM under her tutelage is fully ready to go after what he wants and get Eleni to marry him. (One of the things Phillip was most worried about leaving was AM being influenced by Roger/Blake-ironically he asks Ross to look after AM for him.) Obviously AM then proceeds to treat Blake shabbily which is a big part of why Ross sympathizes with her, but a lot of that was some pretty severe self-sabotage/self-loathing by Blake as she really kept coming back for more and she was still manipulating him the whole time but now he was more hardened and knew what she was doing. I found the Blake/AM dynamic really interesting in that period where he's basically leading her on, as he's basically an ass regardless of what he does at that point. If he drops her from his life/the company she has nothing at all left, but even if he does better at maintaining boundaries there's no way she doesn't push right past them. With how connected Blake/Frank were when AM/Eleni first got married I actually think they wanted a period of a quadrangle of Blake/AM/Frank/Eleni with Blake/AM eventually getting back together after learning things from "good" people-softened some but still coloring outside the lines (because of course AM gets sucked into Roger's empire plans haha). I do think they were floundering a bit once Blake was taken away as a long-term option for AM.

The AM/Eleni/Frank story dragged on way too long-it irked me that AM was basically a prop for Frank for well over a year plus it was just an excruciating slow motion train wreck for his lies to unravel. I couldn't believe how long they dragged things on post explosion/Mallet injury. What's kind of funny is I feel like someone saw the summer 1994 plot line for AM as finally giving Rick a spotlight with his quest to find Alan and the wandering the beach as a hobo doing soliloquies about Alan. I have no doubt someone was super excited about Rick and Marcy Walker having all those overly dramatic scenes together as he was recovering.

The computer thing is super hilarious across the board between the 1991 gigantic laptop that apparently needs code to do anything and Harley taking a few weeks of computer courses and instantly being the only person AM can trust with his computer needs. I guess Spaulding didn't have a networked system yet because all the Foundation records were on that one laptop where Harley had set up an unbreakable password. Definitely one of those suspension of disbelief plots, but I very much enjoyed Roger wanting to steal his money and run away with Mindy but constantly getting thwarted by AM/Harley/Blake showing unexpected professional competence. Blake would be so excited these things she was doing for AM and go running to Roger for his approval who had to act proud while seething internally.